Friday, February 8th 2019
Apple MacBook Pro 2018 Appears to Have a Serious Design Flaw
Apple's MacBook Pro (2018) with the AMD Radeon RX Vega 20 graphics option appears to have a serious design flaw related to its video subsystem. The laptop tends to show severe screen flickering and lines crossing through the picture after waking up from extended periods of idling (after the display has turned off). The problem persists even through reboots. A reboot will make the flickering go away, however the next time the MacBook idles and decides to turn off its display, waking the machine will bring the flicker back. Most common remedies an enthusiast could think of, such as disabling the auto-switching between integrated- and discrete GPUs, and preventing the monitor from idling, don't appear to fix the problem.
The problem was discovered on a brand new $4,500 15-inch MacBook Pro (Intel Core i9, AMD Vega 20, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD). Upon its discovery, it was taken to the Apple Store, where the employees immediately replaced it without further questions when they heard "display corruption after standby". The replacement process was hassle-free, it looks like others have faced this issue with this MacBook Pro model and Apple is trying to quickly resolve it to keep the lid on it. However, after a couple of days, the problem re-surfaced on the replacement MacBook, too. Both models were running MacOS "Mojave" version 10.14.2.
TechPowerUp staff member Crmaris depended on this MacBook Pro to see him through the rigors of TechPowerUp's CES 2019 coverage, which includes image editing and video rendering on the move, which requires the serious CPU and GPU power on tap with this particular MacBook Pro variant. Video rendering and transcoding tasks can run up to hours, during which the MacBook usually sits unused, plugged in. By default, the monitor times out after a certain amount of time. Perhaps this is the key to reproducing the issue: let the display time out while the machine is utilizing the discrete GPU for something other than driving the display. Crmaris is also the editor of HardwareBusters, and has described the issue on a more personal level in the video linked below.
If you have encountered a similar issue, please do let us know in the comments below, so we can get an idea how widespread this problem is.
Source:
Hardware Busters (YouTube)
The problem was discovered on a brand new $4,500 15-inch MacBook Pro (Intel Core i9, AMD Vega 20, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD). Upon its discovery, it was taken to the Apple Store, where the employees immediately replaced it without further questions when they heard "display corruption after standby". The replacement process was hassle-free, it looks like others have faced this issue with this MacBook Pro model and Apple is trying to quickly resolve it to keep the lid on it. However, after a couple of days, the problem re-surfaced on the replacement MacBook, too. Both models were running MacOS "Mojave" version 10.14.2.
If you have encountered a similar issue, please do let us know in the comments below, so we can get an idea how widespread this problem is.
156 Comments on Apple MacBook Pro 2018 Appears to Have a Serious Design Flaw
And if others "like to get f*cked by a company" or maybe dont even see it as such, how does that impact anyone else? why do people feel the need to drop hate fueled comments every time anything is written about Apple, or Tesla, or Justin Bieber, etc etc etc etc? Its like people being against gay marriage or something.
They never have bad products per se but the difference is smaller now.
This might as well be on AMD and not apple, wouldn't be the first time an gpu manufacturer is the cause (Nvidia!) on some of the products it's apple's fault.
Overall apple has higher death rate of the products because of design over function at all cost.
Some poeple like that, I am not one of them, OSX is pretty ok (have hackintosh on my rig too :) )
Most of the ignorant people likes to get carried away by their idiom and they want to continue their life like they used to. Intelligent people can adapt and improve. Stupid can talk and criticize nothing more, youtube full of these people, one of the biggest tech/channels on youtube pewdiepie, ltt, gamersnexus instigate this instinct on homo sapiens.
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ThinkPad P1 Mobile Workstation @ $2,904 with Intel® Xeon® E-2176M ( Not i9 but Comparable) (6 Core (2.70GHz, up to 4.40GHz)) + 32 GB DDR4 2666MHz ECC + 1TB PCIe-NVMe OPAL2.0 M.2 + Nvidia Quadro P2000 4GB
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Also cannot believe you called pewdiepie a "tech channel" and called it in the same sentence/breath as gamersnexus.
Lastly non of it answered anything I said
You're seriously telling me two similarly configured laptops priced over $1k apart aren't comparable because one of them is like 5mm thicker? Well, here's something for your thought: the thicker laptop will do better job cooling that CPU and actually give you better performance.
A huge number of modern companies also fully engulf the applesphere of tech so using Apple products becomes basically expected and almost impossible to do without them.
Most people using these or even the ones you linked are doing a 4hr render of whatever. Having the added cooling capacity is wasted space for a large portion of the people actually purchasing these. My 4980HQ based MBP absolutely throttles. It also wipes the floor with anything in its class.
I don't care your opinion on Apple. The laptops are brilliant feats in engineering. Makes the MSI and Dell products look like they were designed by toddlers with crayons.
The logic boards also seem to have 3-4 the lifespan an alienware of a similar gen. I can't tell you just how many Dell boards I replaced because the dumb things went bad.
That said, I do think Apple tried to stick too much hardware into too thin a chassis, so I’m not surprised that there are thermal or other issues. I do wonder about the GPU, too—are there even any other Vega 20 laptops on the market?
Why would anyone knowingly do this to themselves when it's obvious there are more capable laptops on the market?
As an engineer, when something fails... you want as many devices that reproduce as possible.
Years ago I made the mistake of trying to help track down fail state on drive carriers... they wanted 4 drive carriers with fail states...
Found 1 carrier in 2k drives... I made myself unavailable for future research sessions.
for image editing, you can always use opencv & python.
I have never needed anything more than core i5 & gtx1050 as a mobile workstation, my previous machine had i7&960M almost similar performance.
I wonder how long Apple can keep this up. Their product portfolio is rapidly deteriorating.